Erika Mitchell's Blog, page 8

Gym, Parent, Laundry

I had an important realization the other day. I’d been feeling enormously frustrated about my weight because, for the last two months, I’ve been kicking absolute ass with eating well and exercising and have only lost five measly pounds to date. For someone with well over thirty five pounds to lose, five pounds in two months really sucks.

It’s been the weirdest thing. Longtime readers of this blog will remember I’ve lost this exact set of pounds twice before. I’m pretty good at it. It’s not like I’m a weight loss novice with no idea what she’s doing. My weight loss method is the same this time, but the results are not.

Strange, right?

Granted, what I have to remember is I’m still rehabbing my knee from the surgery I had back in May. My leg atrophied quite a bit from the years of pain and seven weeks of crutches, and now I’m getting stronger and muscle weighs more than fat and blah blah blah.

Still. SO FRUSTRATING.

Every morning I’d weigh myself and get profoundly dejected and frustrated. How could I be exercising so much and eating so little and still be so overweight?! IT SHOULD NOT BE PHYSICALLY POSSIBLE.

And yet, surprise surprise, getting upset about the whole thing wasn’t magically making me thinner. It wasn’t until two things happened that I stopped feeling the acidic caress of futility every morning:

One, Wes hid my scale. As much as it annoys me on occasion not to know whether I’m making progress, I’m for SURE a lot happier being in the dark about whatever lack of weight loss I’ve got going on.

Two, I realized while I was praying that I’ve been focusing on exactly the wrong thing. For years, I’ve been praying for a relief from my knee pain. For the freedom to move and exercise and even sleep without pain, and you know what? I can. And what am I doing? Complaining about the numbers on the scale.

I realized that the list of things my body can do FAR outweighs what it won’t do right now, and man, that’s significant. I’d be a fool to keep my focus on my weight when I can hug my kids, go for walks with my family, think clearly, hear, see, sing, and enjoy good health.

It’s amazing how a simple shift in perspective can make life much better!

Also, I’m now at the gym six times a week. I’m officially in danger of becoming one of those people who starts all her stories with, “I was at the gym the other day and…” because this is all I do now. Gym, Parent, Laundry. Pretty exciting stuff, huh?

Thanks for sharing!

Stump the Pastry Chef

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending a French pastry cooking class with my mother in law and sisters in law. We baked madeleines, an apple tarte tatin, and some eclairs.

At the beginning of the class, the teacher invited us to come share our baking horror stories and, when I told her I’d managed to set some scones on fire, she pressed me for more details.

Now, bear in mind, this is a lady who has interned at bakeries in both France and England. She can whip up a batch of cream puffs in her sleep. She’s probably seen every baking error in the book, so I was confident that she’d know what I did wrong the fateful morning I conflagrated a batch of breakfast pastries.

I explained to her how I cut the butter into the lemon ricotta scones, how I then pressed them into a greased scone pan, and then put them into the oven only to run to said oven in horror when thick black smoke started pouring up to the ceiling. The smoke detector blaring, I opened the oven to see butter bubbling up out of the scone pan and onto the bottom of the oven, where it was burning on contact and stinking to high heaven.

Of course, this happened to be the moment the friends we’d invited over for breakfast arrived. The chaos, stench, and mess definitely spelled out a sincere welcome, trust me.

After I relayed this story, the pastry chef wiped her brow with the back of one hand and said, “I’ve never heard of that happening before.”

You see, in a scone recipe, cutting chunks of cold butter into the dough enables the butter to be a rising agent. As the butter melts, the steam pushes the dough up to create little pockets of luscious deliciousness. Only in mine, the butter just leaked out to ruin brunch.

I have to imagine blundering a recipe so bad a pastry chef can’t even figure out what you did is some kind of accomplishment. Like, maybe in the great video game of life I’ve unlocked a new level and my badge looks like an oven on fire?

Question is, is that considered leveling up or down?

Thanks for sharing!

Two Less-Chubby Thumbs Up

Well, I don’t know about you, but 2016 is off to a great start for me. I’m down almost five pounds since Christmas (amazing what you can accomplish when your knee allows you to exercise), my house is organized, my kids are doing great, Wes and I are clicking, life is good. Makes for boring blogging, though.

My only complaint, and really it’s a small one, is that the gym is SO overcrowded. I’m still seeing the regulars around, but now there are all these new people camping out on machines, taking up all the lockers, and taking up the stretching mat area so I have to take a mat over to the hard scratchy floor when I’m done with my workout. Boo.

While I’m tickled there are so many people trying to get healthier, I’m annoyed they’re doing it at my gym, all at the same time.

Truth be told, I’ve never understood the point of New Year resolutions. I’m assuming the people at the gym were flabby/untoned/overweight/etc. before the holidays, so why wait until January to do something about it?

Anyway, annoyances aside, life is good. Also, I’m reading a book right now that I’m obsessed with: The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell. I’ll never write that well. Ever. It’s both comforting and a little discouraging.

How’s your 2016 shaping up so far?

Thanks for sharing!

New Year, New Post

That title really says it all, doesn’t it? Once a year is my new blogging goal. If I can do that, I reckon it’ll satisfy the five of you who still check here for new content. Oh, don’t mind me. I’m only kidding. I know there’s three of you.

Wow, though. What haven’t I been up to since my last post?

Look at this cake. LOOK AT IT.

In December, Wes and I celebrated ten years of marriage by renewing our vows in front of most of our nearest and dearest. We threw the kind of holiday party we’ve always wanted to throw, and I realized that the one thing that’s been missing in my life up until now is Cards Against Humanity. Between CAH and the champagne I had for dinner, it was an exceptionally merry evening. My best friend baked an incredible, decadent, fancy-pants cake for us, and there was laughter and festivity at our house until after midnight. For old folks like us, that was quite late and I woke up the next morning feeling approximately one million years old. I was a dessicated, dried-up mummy and the only thing I could do all day was lie on the couch and doze. If that’s not indicative of an excellent party, I don’t know what is.

After our party, Wes surprised me with a four-day trip to Seattle wherein we stayed at a lovely hotel, went out for fancy dinners, and walked around downtown amid Christmas finery like two people with nary a care in the world. And we were! Life is going really well and we were delighted to celebrate our tenth anniversary wherever we went. We found an amazing coffee shop in Pike Place Market called Ghost Alley Espresso which, for those in the know, is tucked into the corner under the stairs leading to the infamous Gum Wall. I had the best espresso of my life there, and the proprietor is a lovely lady with a knack for crafting de-freaking-licious latte concoctions. We found a little bakery next to our hotel called La Belle Epicurean and there was no shortage of delightful confections to sample there.

We also had an encounter that sounds like something out of a dream. We were walking through downtown when we passed a guy walking an Irish Wolfhound (If you’ve never seen an Irish Wolfhound, they’re huge!). We said hello to the guy and the dog, after which we played ping pong at some tables set out on the sidewalk for some reason, but I couldn’t pick up the ball for some reason because my gloves were too slippery. Doesn’t that sound weird? I also may have eaten the tiny pumpkin cheesecake we bought from the Confectional down in Pike Place Market that I promised I’d save half of for Wes, and that made his face look like the picture on the left.

Us standing in front of the strangely inexplicable trash sculpture at McCaw Hall.

Then, for our grand finale, we went to see the Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Nutcracker, followed by a midnight viewing of Star Wars. Because we got to the theatre fifteen minutes before the movie started, we got to watch the movie from almost the front row, but we didn’t care because we both enjoyed the movie so much. The Nutcracker was dreamy and fun, Star Wars was not a huge disappointment (which was really all we were asking for), and we came home exhausted from way. too. much. fun.

Suffice it to say, we thoroughly celebrated ten years of matrimony in the highest of styles. Here’s to the New Year, and the next ten!

Thanks for sharing!

Facebook Detox

Something really cool has been happening to me this year. I don’t know if it’s the fact that I turned thirty, or had major surgery and its accompanying abundance of recovery time, or if maybe years of eating non-organic food has finally caught up with me, but something is definitely up and I’m really enjoying it.

I took a break from writing earlier this year, mostly because I was totally burnt out and needed some space. Once I got a little distance from writing, I realized there was a lot about being a published author that was making me miserable at this stage of my life. When you’re chasing two school-age children around, doing the nonstop hustle-for-sales and self-promotion schtick gets really annoying, really fast. I enjoyed the book sales, though. That was definitely cool.

Anyway, as I started to wean myself onto a simpler life, I started noticing that Facebook was irritating me more than entertaining me lately. The endless clickbait articles, unsolicited opinions, and pictures of people I never see started feeling…pointless. I realized that, once I got some distance from the Dopamine reward system of likes and comments, there really wasn’t much I was getting from my relationship with Facebook so I disabled my account.

It’s been almost a month now, and I don’t really miss it. I’m grateful, actually, to be rid of something that commoditized my life in order to figure out how best to make money off me. Plus, with the upcoming election coming up I’m thinking I got out just in time to still think fondly of my casual acquaintances.

The nice thing is, I’m much more likely to text the people I want to stay in touch with and ask them how they’re doing now. I think before I just kind of assumed Facebook would tell me what I needed to know, but I think I’m likely a better friend now.

Who can say what other changes might be on the horizon? Hopefully more weight loss. I’m flogging that dead horse again, so to speak. My knee is feeling great, though, so that means it’s time to exercise again before another injury strikes.

I’m also writing again, though with the door firmly closed. A good friend reminded me of how much fun it was to write when it was just something I did for fun, and I’m happy to find out he was right when he said one day I’d write something again that was just for me. It’s a good thing I’m not planning to try to publish this one, though, because I doubt I’d ever find a publisher who’d be willing to let me shirk the social media thing out of simple preference.

So that’s the story. I can still be found on Twitter, and on here occasionally, but other than that I suppose the boring minutiae of my life will have to remain a mystery. I’m sure the dozens of people who read my updates will just have to make do without knowing how many loads of laundry I folded today…

Thanks for sharing!

Empty Robot Promises

The story I’m about to tell you is kind of weird. Kind of like when I got pulled over for being a tired driver and a passing car full of hot-boxers made the officer question whether my husband is a drug dealer. Except, this story doesn’t involve drugs. That I know of.

The scene is a parking garage beneath the medical office where I’ve just received a shot of synthetic joint fluid. My knee is sore and all I want to do is go home. I take my parking ticket to the lobby of the building, where one of those automated machines is supposed to take my money and validate my ticket so I can leave the parking garage.

Bummer for me, the machine isn’t working. The credit card processor is offline, so I’m advised by the repair man to just pay the lady in the kiosk on my way out of the garage.

I limp my way to my car and drive up to the exit only to see that there is no lady in the kiosk. There is, however, a guy in front of me in line who is likewise waiting for the nonexistent lady to let us out. While we wait, car after car queues up behind us until there is a line of idling cars stretching down the parking lot exit ramp as far as I can see.

At this point, it’s been five minutes and still no lady. I turn off my car and start reading an article on my phone. The guy in front of me pushes the Call for Help button on the malfunctioning ticket validator and a loud alert starts booming out of a small speaker: PLEASE WAIT, YOUR CALL IS BEING ANSWERED. PLEASE WAIT, YOUR CALL IS BEING ANSWERED. PLEASE WAIT, YOUR CALL IS BEING ANSWERED.

I roll up my window and keep reading. It has now been ten minutes. Still, the voice booms: PLEASE WAIT, YOUR CALL IS BEING ANSWERED. PLEASE WAIT, YOUR CALL IS BEING ANSWERED. PLEASE WAIT, YOUR CALL IS BEING ANSWERED. Over and over again like the waves of a tension headache.

Behind us, horns are honking and people are starting to yell. The guy behind me uses his truck to hop the curb and drive around the metal arm trapping us in the garage, sideswiping his mirror against a dumpster on his way out.

Fifteen minutes have passed. Horns are more persistent, almost loud enough to drown out PLEASE WAIT, YOUR CALL IS BEING ANSWERED. PLEASE WAIT, YOUR CALL IS BEING ANSWERED. PLEASE WAIT, YOUR CALL IS BEING ANSWERED. Still no kiosk lady. My ears hurt.

Tired of sitting there with my sore knee, I start calling everyone I can think of who might be able to let us out. I call the front desk of the medical office I was just seen in, and they give me the number for building security and promise to do whatever else they can. I call building security and let them know we’re trapped. I call the main hospital security desk and bring them in as well.

Twenty minutes have passed, and I’m about to call the National Guard when a building security guys walks in and surveys the scene with shock. While he fiddles about with the validating machine (useless), the kiosk lady finally returns with a carrier full of Starbucks drinks in one hand and a rolled-up magazine in her other hand. She is likewise shocked and asks the guy in front of me why we didn’t just pay at the lobby. I’m surprised he doesn’t shoot her.

After he’s let loose, I roll up and she tries to charge me extra for the time I spent sitting in front of her extra kiosk. I let her know in no uncertain terms that I will only be paying the amount I would have paid had I not gotten trapped in this stupid garage. She huffs but capitulates, likely because she can sense she’ll find little no mercy among the dozens of motorists who have been held captive to her coffee break.

Finally free, I zoom home with my ears still ringing with the empty promise of a robotic voice screaming PLEASE WAIT, YOUR CALL IS BEING ANSWERED. PLEASE WAIT, YOUR CALL IS BEING ANSWERED. PLEASE WAIT, YOUR CALL IS BEING ANSWERED.

I hear it in my dreams, sometimes. It’s the haunting sound of futility, the embodiment of knowing you’re trapped by a thin metal arm all because you’re not willing to scratch up the front of your car in an effort to escape.

If given another twenty minutes of that racket, I might have.

Thanks for sharing!

That One Time When Erika Was Cool

It’s worth noting that I’ll never be Amy Dunne-caliber cool, because who would want to be?!

I’m not what you’d traditionally think of as a Cool Girl. I think lame puns are funny, I don’t know how to throw a football, and I can in no way hold my liquor. I’m a goofball, but mostly harmless, so I take no issue with my inherent lack of whatever constitutes coolness these days.

That’s not to say I don’t occasionally dabble in coolness, though. Every once in a great while, I’ll know something or have done something that someone thinks is cool and then, for one brief little moment, I get to be cool.

An example of this happened awhile ago while I was at physical therapy. I was chatting with my physical therapist when he mentioned he owns a gun and had gotten his wife interested in shooting it. I asked him what kind of gun he owns when he asked, “You know guns?”

I replied that years of writing thrillers has acquainted me with a shallow familiarity with firearms, and he said he had a Sig Sauer.

Now, this is where I got to be cool for, like, a minute. I perked up and said, “A P226?”

He was so surprised that I knew what kind of gun he had, after which I mentioned how big the grip is on those to accommodate the expanded magazine but how the gun made up for that by being a real pleasure to fire.

We talked guns for a while and I left feeling happy but also kind of like a fraud, and here’s why. With the possible exception of a Colt 1911 and S&W .38 Chief’s Special, the P226 is the only gun I know much about specifically. I’ve fired a variety of weapons and have a passing familiarity with them, but I can’t converse about them as much as I can about the P226.

If he’d owned any other kind of gun, I wouldn’t have had much to say. I lucked out and got to be the cool girl who knows about guns.

I’m not gonna lie, it felt good even though the foundation of my mystique is a façade. Maybe that’s the big secret, though. Maybe coolness is a single moment rather than a consistent state of being, in which case no one is ever really cool through and through. If perhaps you think you know someone who’s cool at all times, maybe that just means you don’t know that person well enough.

What do you think?

Thanks for sharing!

Not Quite the Promised Land

I’ve been a parent for almost six years. Six long, eventful years of having a tiny entourage in my wake at almost all times. It’s been busy. And stressful. And awesome. And messy. And the best.

Now, though, for the first time, I have both kids in school at the same time, twice a week. This means that at least twice a week, I have a slight panic that I’ve driven away from school and forgotten someone. I go home to my quiet house, where I  drink coffee in peace and watch grown-up shows loudly and without interruption. No one tries to drown LEGOs in my coffee, no one needs me to watch them jump on the trampoline, and I can listen to grown-up music in the car without worrying that my kids are going to learn a bunch of fun new words.

It’s terrific, really. I like it quite a bit, but I’ll admit that it’s kind of weird at the same time. Thanks to ongoing physical therapy and doctor appointments, I don’t have a ton of spare time to relax, but the time I do is wonderful.

So take heed, parents of young children: A time is coming when all your kids will be in school all at the same time. Peace and quiet will be yours. Availability to meet friends for coffee or make a doctors appointment is coming. It’s not quite the promised land of parenting, but it’s darn close.

Thanks for sharing!

True Detective: Season One and Season Don’t

Trust me, watching the finale will make you feel like the people in this picture.

When Wes and started watching season one of True Detective, Wes was surprised to find I was hooked. “What about this show interests you so much?” he asked me. It was, after all, a slow-moving story line, precisely the kind I’ve proved allergic to in the past. Shows like The Wire and Battlestar Gallactica, shows that most people love, bore me silly. To say Wes gets frustrated by my impatient taste is neither an understatement nor an overstatement. It is, simply, the truth.

Why, then, should True Detective be any different? I wasn’t even much of a Matthew McConaughey fan, and the story wends and weaves through twenty years of secrets and mysteries. Sounds like classic Erika eye-roll territory.

I decided then and there that what I want most in a show is the following:

Interesting people doing interesting things in an interesting way.

It must have those three components or I just can’t seem to sit still or engross myself in the story the way I want to. Season one of True Detective had all these in spades. I loved what they did with that story and the acting was perfection. I tuned into season two hoping for much of the same. I actually liked all the actors in season two, so I was optimistic that I’d enjoy season two as well.

No. Such. Luck.

I suppose I need to add a new component to my  list:

A cogent story line with an ending that justifies the story’s means.

There’s just a level of trust a viewer invests in a show’s writers. Trust that the long journey will be worth it in the end. Trust that the heartbreak and sacrifices made along the way will prove worth it. Trust that, even if we don’t get it in the beginning or even in the middle, that it will all make sense in the end and we will finish the last episode grateful to have hung in there.

Whoever was responsible for the story of season two violated that trust in every single way. I agree completely with the reviews that say the second season could have benefited from a room full of writers as opposed to just the one guy at the helm. I’d like to think a collaboration of writers might have saved it from itself.

Maybe not, though. I don’t know. All I know is that my list of qualifications for enjoying shows is getting longer and that’s a tad worrisome. Maybe I’ll just stick to reruns of Scrubs, The Office, Parks and Rec, 30 Rock, House M.D., and Arrested Development...

Thanks for sharing!

The Earthquake Freak-Out of 2015

Early on in our marriage, Wes and I didn’t really have to be apart very much. Barring three weeks apart when my dad passed away, we were pretty much always together. Now that Wes is this big-time important software genius, though, he’s in demand. He has to take trips a few times a year to facilitate the projects he’s working on, which means I’m left to hold down the fort alone.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I am an exceedingly capable person. I can run a household efficiently, teach my children to read, and do it all with a perpetually clean kitchen. I’m awesome at my job.

The thing is, though, I’m maybe a little too efficient. If Wes isn’t here to insist I settle down and relax, I end up doing overly ambitious things like mopping the garage after the kids go to bed (long story), yard work well past the point when I should stop, or vacuuming the stairs when my post op knee should be elevated and iced after a long day.

I can’t imagine why a massive earthquake would terrify me so much. This isn’t horrifying AT ALL.

Perhaps the best example of the beneficial way Wes affects me is what I am heretofore referring to as the Earthquake Freak-Out of 2015.

Perhaps you read this article earlier in the week? Paraphrased, it basically says the pacific northwest is due for a massive earthquake that will essentially liquefy the ground we stand on and result in a tsunami that destroys everything west of I-5. Infrastructure will collapse! No water or food or shelter! Run for the hills, we’re all going to die!

Now, I am an anxious sort of person anyway. After reading this, I did what any reasonable person would do: I called my best friend and freaked her out, too. But after I did that, I brooded and fretted and ran through various emergency scenarios in my head. I made plans. I rearranged my pantry so bottles wouldn’t come crashing down. I read survival guides.

What I did not do, however, was call Wes, because he was busy and couldn’t break away long enough to talk me down.

For two days I lived like this, always on the alert for the tell-tale dog freak-out that would herald The Really Big One. Thankfully, some earthquake experts on Reddit did an AMA that was comforting, and later that night Wes finally called me. We spent half an hour discussing our emergency plan and deciding on which supplies to keep on hand. We designated our emergency out of state contact. We discussed contingencies. We picked emergency kits.

But seriously, it took Wes half an hour to talk me down to a calm, non-panicked state. Two days is a long time to spiral out in larger and greater concentric spheres of worry, and there was no one here to help me parse my crazy for me. As I said, it’s not so much that I can’t function without Wes than that I function maybe a little too well without him. Brain going a million miles an hour with nary a safeguard in place.

On the plus side, in the event of an emergency we’ll be equipped to survive for a week. Our kids will have food, water, and first aid supplies. Wes and I will be able to coordinate even if we’re in different places when the disaster happens. Providing none of us suffers substantial injuries, we’ll all likely make it out in one piece. So I guess you could say, the Earthquake Freak-Out of 2015 wasn’t an altogether waste of time.

Something good came out of it, and I don’t just mean an excuse to reorganize my pantry!

Thanks for sharing!